Day VI: A Taste For Love (2008)

(A.k.a. the Dracula musical from FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL)

I'm not going to insult anyone's intelligence by actually attempting to review five minutes of a film as if it were a real film. But what I would like to discuss is the usage of Dracula as a symbol. This task is made somewhat easier for me since FSM makes the subtext of what he represents here, well, text.

In one of the raw-ish emotional moments of FSM, Pete (Jason Segal) explains that he identifies with Dracula because, like him, he believes he is cursed to suck dry everyone he grows close to. Which, self-pity aside, is actually quite good usage of the myth. As noted in Day Two's review of DRACULA (1931), the good Count and vampires generally have often been employed as metaphors for erotic longing. (Never more so than in the last decade, starting around the time of Coppola's film to become the dominant thematic element.) What could one long for more than what he loves most but always destroys?

Towards the climax of FSM, Pete, with the emotional assistant of Rachel (Mila Kunis), abandons the self-pity and realizes that a dracula musical with puppets works best when played for laughs. Why not let the wounds inflicted by Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) heal? After all, the vampier's main victim, Mina Harker, is traditionally cured when the forces of good (the men of her native land or the kindly hotel staff) defeat the forces of evil (Dracula as lusty foreignor or Sarah Marshall the distant television sex symbol).

Playing Dracula's predicament for laughs in fact maintains the essense of the metaphor as well as if it were drama. Only in stories are people forever cursed by tragic loves. Pete, whose heart has now healed, can see the comedy in the story. Although he presumably still identifies with Dracula to a degree, as I am sure most of us could, he also recognizes that Dracula need not be a horrific visage but rather an object of friendly ridicule, as if to commit an act of distancing to prevent him from ever becoming such a creature. Only vampires don't see the light of day eventually.

OVERALL: No rating, but high marks for thematic usage of the Dracula myth.